Martin LARSEN

Poems

Martin Larsen, born 1969, is a writer, a translator and a critic. He is also an editor at the Basilisk publishing house. Martin Larsen is among Denmark’s most experimental and ground-breaking writers. He debuted in 1997 with a floppy disk named “Tabula Rasa.” In 2001 he made his lyrical debut, “Det stof alting er gjort af” (The material from which all is made). For this collection, he received the Rifbjerg Debutant Prize. He has explored the limits of the book medium with “Svanesøsonetterne” (The Swan Lake Sonnets) from 2004: a box containing 60 curled up notes for a sonnet cycle.
The poem for this year’s Transpoesie is taken from his 2009 collection “Noter til det mere perfekte liv” (Notes for the more perfect life). This collection consists of metro poems, written according to the precedent set by French poet Jacques Jouet of the poetry group OULIPO (Ouvrir de Littérature Potentielle). The poems are written while travelling by metro – the first line is thought out while the train moves and must be written down when the train pauses at the next station.